Something Different (and not a flower)

After a long hiatus (since 1989 or so) I returned to painting in about 2015. You’ll never see those first tentative attempts, and most of them have been destroyed! Among those I eventually felt comfortable posting were several paintings of doors. You may recall seeing them. I still have a couple of those but most went into the annual yard waste fire. They were good practice for composition, texture and color, and a few of them represent my move away from acrylics and first forays into oil paint.

A visit to Fort Worden/Point Wilson in Port Townsend in late 2018 resulted in a series of works.
This particular one up top is my favorite, thought the BLP prefers the boat painting, and our youngest likes the tree painting best.
Hidden Story is 20″ x 20″ oil on canvas. It’s about a doorway in a large concrete bunker.  Apparently, vandals feel the need to spray paint graffiti on these large and inviting canvases. Maintenance staff cover it up periodically, using what I believe is donated paint, resulting in a patchwork of color and shape that I found interesting. The doors were all pretty wonderful, too. I took a lot of reference pictures but I like the light in this one best.

This particular painting was just invited into the CVG 2021 juried show- I apply every year, and get in about half the time. This year I was lucky! You never know what a jurist is looking for, and it really doesn’t matter to me. I don’t paint for jurors.

Here are a few of the other paintings that came out of my visit to Fort Worden:
(left) Tribunal
(middle) Point Wilson Lighthouse
(right) The Chetzemoka, Dreaming

For more info on the history of Fort Worden, see this Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Worden